The Creative's Corner

Sedona will soon be having their annual Winefest. Part of the event is a photography contest. As soon as I heard this I instantly had an idea for a photograph. Unfortunately, the rules state that accepted artwork must be delivered one hour before the event starts on Saturday, and picked-up one hour before the event closes on Sunday. This just didn’t work with my schedule, but I still wanted to make the photograph, so here it is.

Want to know how I made this photograph?

Equipment

When I lived in California, I did a lot of studio photography. But over the years I’ve sold most of my studio equipment. I still have the background frame, light stands, umbrellas and reflectors, but the strobes and backgrounds are gone. I shot this image using a TV tray as a stand, two sheets of white artist’s paper and a white plastic trash bag for my background and my 30-year old Vivitar 285 Thyristor Zoom on-camera flash for lighting. It’s not fancy or new, but it works.

Shooting

I wanted to shoot all the components separately so I could position them the way I wanted, and make any adjustments needed in Photoshop. The grapes and grape leaves in the background I already had. They are in my new ebook “The Vanishing Old West – Jerome.” The rest of the photographs we (my girlfriend Linda-Ann https://www.facebook.com/LindaAnnStewart helped out) took in our living room.

Creating The Photograph

1. I cropped and processed each image in Photoshop.
2. Then I opened a blank Photoshop file, and dragged the image of grape leaves into it.
3. Next, I dragged the picture of the wine glass, and followed the steps in this great tutorial from Russell Brown http://www.creativepro.com/article/mask-glass-blend-it-new-background
4. Once the glass was done, I reduced the Opacity of the background to 69%.
5. My hand holding the grape was then brought in and positioned to line up with the wine.
6. I then dragged in the bunch of grapes and positioned them and had them on the layer below the layer for the wine glass. This put them behind the glass. I felt I needed more grapes, so I duplicated the grapes layer, flipped them vertically and positioned them. These grapes were on the layer above the glass so they are in front of the wine glass. The grapes are in a semicircle, so they wrapped around the glass nicely. The grapes also helped remove the “floating in air” look of the wine glass.
7. I didn’t like the way the grapes looked through the stem of the wine glass, so I cut out one of the grapes from the image of a row of grapes, and dragged it into the file. I then duplicated it three times, and placed it over three grapes that you could see through the stem of the glass. I erased any part of these individual grapes that were showing on either side of the stem, and adjusted the opacity to match the grape each one was sitting over. This made it look like more of the grape was showing through the stem of the glass. I could have also burned-in the part of the grape that was behind the stem, but I preferred to do it the first way.
8. I also placed this single grape in a couple of places to fill holes in the photograph of the bunch of grapes.

And that’s how I put it all together. Even though I can’t get it into the contest, I had a lot of fun creating this photograph.

So what do you think of my wacky creation? Any questions?

Have Fun,
Jeff